Transformation and Leadership

What are specific ways transformations take place in an organization? Why are transformations critical to leadership and organizational success?

Solution Preview

Transformational Leadership by definition is the broadening and elevating of the awareness, acceptance and attitudes of the workforce beyond their personal interest for the good of a group or company (Bass, 1990)

Here is a perfect example of what your assignment is talking about. Notice the highlighted words in this response because they will be important facts that you will need for your assignment.

Problem Statement

McKinsey & Company is a highly successful consulting firm worth over 1.8 billion dollars. However, its leader Rajat Gupta wondered if the company could better utilize the knowledge of its employees to better serve its worldwide clients. It was obvious that McKinsey & Company had a strong base of core competencies among its employees, but Gupta was unsure if knowledge development was meeting its clients' needs in an information and knowledge driven age. Clients hired McKinsey & Company expecting leading edge information from to assist them in their decision-making processes. Gupta felt a process was needed to develop, capture, and leverage this information which he considered an asset to the company. So, the task lay before them on how to accumulate and store the information quickly and make it readily available to consultants on a global scale.

List of Symptoms

McKinsey & Company desired to provide state-of-the-art knowledge to its clients but currently had no means of measuring exactly how well they were doing in developing their knowledge.

Employees were not being properly developed for the new direction of the McKinsey & Company. McKinsey & Company still had the ability to provide excellent advice to its Clients. However, they were not as prepared as their competitors for dealing with the upcoming technologies of the future.

McKinsey & Company had experienced rapid growth. McKinsey & Company had 3,800 consultants in 69 offices worldwide. In its present state, the large number of employees and offices it managed actually hindered McKinsey from effectively performing its operations worldwide. Essentially, McKinsey & Company had become too large for itself under its current architecture.

Alternative Solutions

McKinsey & Company did not desire to rest on its laurels and remain content with the status quo; rather they aggressively sought out to find answers to their dilemmas. They realized that being a 1.8 billion dollar company did not come easily and also that without modifications they would not remain in their top position in consulting.

McKinsey & Company must implement a system of knowledge management in which the entire organization is able to benefit from the sharing of knowledge ...